[FRIAM] [ SPAM ] Re: A New Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution
Glen sed: ... But re: thoughts, I can also say that _embedding_ one's thoughts as deeply in, as tightly coupled to, one's actions, does allow for agility. Taking huge, far-sighted, ideological stances and making huge sweeping plans on _anything_ is well, ideological (which is an insult) and goes directly against everything biology has taught us over these last 156 years. Biological systems are complexes of tightly coupled, small changes that can eventually produce dramatic differences. I think this point is important or at least interesting: The *point* of ideologies is to set a (more) global fitness function, allowing a different mode of coupling than happens, for example, without shared ideology. But action is all very local. So, I try to make my actions small, realizing that 99.99% or more of all my actions are inconsequential. If thought is causative at all, it is at this very small scale. The rest is noise. At one level, what made the Roman Empire the Roman Empire was the gajillion small actions of a bazillion human beings, yet, it was the fact that they shared an ideology (no matter what the class, the Roman culture had a story with a place in it for you, whether you be Emperor, Soldier, Slave, or Conquered Subject) which went a long way to define what it was to be a Roman... Or when a bunch of Athapascan peoples migrated from the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest and became who we call Navajo and Apache, they shared *something* more than genes and language... they shared a mythology and a world-view that differed enough from the extant peoples living *in* the Southwest that they remained distinct, were not assimilated... but established a complementary (if often conflictatory) presence in and amongst and around the various cultures already en-situ... what it was to be Dine' could possibly be reduced to their genes, their language and the artifacts they carried or knew how to make... but I find it easier/better if I include the stories they told. All that is preamble to my (again repetitive) statement that diversity is good. Diversity is a good antidote/counterpoint to ossification, as structure is a good antidote/complement to randomness. This is the tension between Logos and Chaos... with a narrow regime where truly interesting stuff happens... Class IV Cellular Automata, for example, Universal Computation for example, Life Itself, for example. On the other hand, these distinctions might just be illusions, held by the delusional. But this argument begs the question of who or what is delusional? An individual sentient creature such as a human being? A group of sentients with a shared ideology? Just sayin' - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [ SPAM ] Re: A New Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution
http://www.brainrules.net/wiring Curt On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 12:00 PM, glen ep ropella g...@tempusdictum.com wrote: On 06/30/2015 09:14 AM, Steve Smith wrote: what it was to be Dine' could possibly be reduced to their genes, their language and the artifacts they carried or knew how to make... but I find it easier/better if I include the stories they told. Yes, compression is real, not ideological. The reason you feel it easier/better is because it helps you with the inverse map from phenomena to mechanism. You have to act on the mechanism. Compression helps you do that. But it doesn't mean that the ideology is shared. It means the compressed analog is shared. The analog is a stand-in for the ephemeral thing you recognize/register. Funny enough, because there are a bunch of animals almost identical to you standing about, they recognize/register that ephemeral thing in much the same way. Their analogs are very similar to your analogs because your body is very similar to theirs. When/if we find communicative life elsewhere (here or other planets), we'll be able to test the hypothesis completely. But we can do it in small bits right here and now. Do amputees understand the world in the same way non-amputees understand the world? Did Helen Keller think the same way sighted and hearing people think? On the other hand, these distinctions might just be illusions, held by the delusional. But this argument begs the question of who or what is delusional? An individual sentient creature such as a human being? A group of sentients with a shared ideology? The delusion is simply in assuming the analog _is_ its referent. It would be like wondering why real airplanes aren't made of balsa wood. This is why I tend to think tele-war (very remotely operated weapons like drones) will cause something like PTSD similar in devastation, but from the opposite circumstance, to the close-up witness of, participation in, violence. That sort of removal from your context can be very difficult, I suspect. You have no choice but to act as if the analog (controller) is the referent (weapon). And it is the same ... yet it's not, because of the very complicated machinery between the controller and the controlled, machinery invisible to the operator. What's doing the assuming? Your body, of course. The better the analog, the more your body is tricked into acting upon the idea as if it's the referent. Ideas are brain processes, analogs for real things to which they refer. E.g. mental manipulation of an image of a 3D object engages many of the same circuits as actual manipulation of the 3D object. The better the ideas, the easier it is to be tricked into thinking those analogs are ultimately accurate, so accurate that the idea is the real thing. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be tricked ... which means I'm completely safe. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [ SPAM ] Re: A New Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution
On 06/30/2015 09:14 AM, Steve Smith wrote: what it was to be Dine' could possibly be reduced to their genes, their language and the artifacts they carried or knew how to make... but I find it easier/better if I include the stories they told. Yes, compression is real, not ideological. The reason you feel it easier/better is because it helps you with the inverse map from phenomena to mechanism. You have to act on the mechanism. Compression helps you do that. But it doesn't mean that the ideology is shared. It means the compressed analog is shared. The analog is a stand-in for the ephemeral thing you recognize/register. Funny enough, because there are a bunch of animals almost identical to you standing about, they recognize/register that ephemeral thing in much the same way. Their analogs are very similar to your analogs because your body is very similar to theirs. When/if we find communicative life elsewhere (here or other planets), we'll be able to test the hypothesis completely. But we can do it in small bits right here and now. Do amputees understand the world in the same way non-amputees understand the world? Did Helen Keller think the same way sighted and hearing people think? On the other hand, these distinctions might just be illusions, held by the delusional. But this argument begs the question of who or what is delusional? An individual sentient creature such as a human being? A group of sentients with a shared ideology? The delusion is simply in assuming the analog _is_ its referent. It would be like wondering why real airplanes aren't made of balsa wood. This is why I tend to think tele-war (very remotely operated weapons like drones) will cause something like PTSD similar in devastation, but from the opposite circumstance, to the close-up witness of, participation in, violence. That sort of removal from your context can be very difficult, I suspect. You have no choice but to act as if the analog (controller) is the referent (weapon). And it is the same ... yet it's not, because of the very complicated machinery between the controller and the controlled, machinery invisible to the operator. What's doing the assuming? Your body, of course. The better the analog, the more your body is tricked into acting upon the idea as if it's the referent. Ideas are brain processes, analogs for real things to which they refer. E.g. mental manipulation of an image of a 3D object engages many of the same circuits as actual manipulation of the 3D object. The better the ideas, the easier it is to be tricked into thinking those analogs are ultimately accurate, so accurate that the idea is the real thing. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be tricked ... which means I'm completely safe. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
[FRIAM] [ SPAM ] Re: A New Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution
Given the personalization algorithms deployed by the major search engines, its hard *not* to see the search engine as a participant in browsing. . . . bob On Jun 30, 2015, at 12:34 PM, Marcus Daniels mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote: There's only 1 reason to interfere/intervene in the milieu around you, that is to participate. Is a search engine a participant in people's web browsing? One can define it that way, but that's not the usual business model.The usual model is to watch and learn, and sell their observations in some way to a third party. Most science is about teasing apart causation in as much detail as possible in a controlled setting. And engineering is about putting it back together in useful ways. Not everything can be understood or controlled that way, but the parts and pieces often can be. That's a fine thing to do, just not the only thing to do. I have no problem with activism. If there's no knowledge about how the parts and pieces of a social system work, nor experience with similar system dynamics behave, then, by all means dive in to the blood and muck, if that sort of thing is fun for you. But if I'm going to spend time debating, say, potential legislation, with people that don't share my particular preferences, then it is a good if we negotiate a protocol for identifying good and bad arguments, so we don't just talk about our preferences all day. The failure to find and maintain such a protocol means the activity becomes political, and is no longer a good faith discussion, but a rivalry.The fewer mutually accepted rules -- the nastier or more pointless the discussion may become. And the faster it gets nasty, the sooner we can found out who the big dog is, because that's all that is at stake. And it is not about objective reality, it's about precision of terminology. What is nailed down sufficiently-well for an analysis about the logical consequences of the nailed-down thing or system of things.It's not clear what this group of people is willing to nail down, even temporarily.Just like it isn't clear what climate change deniers are willing to nail down. It is bad faith, not skepticism, when people put their monetary or ideological goals ahead of the evidence, and then claim they are interested in the evidence. That's what I mean by corruption. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [ SPAM ] Re: A New Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution
Given the personalization algorithms deployed by the major search engines, its hard *not* to see the search engine as a participant in browsing. If the search engine could pass a Turing test, then ok. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
